Skip to content
Technology & Innovation

Does Sex Reduce the National Savings Rate?

Laboratory tests find that exposure to sexual stimulus makes individuals impatient. Does this mean that people in more sexualized societies are less likely to save money?

Rich economies are built on patience. How patient people are to consume determines how much they save. How much they save determines how much they invest and how much they invest influences how quickly economies grow.


So it has to be true that in the past, people in rich economies have been patient.

Economists have spent some time thinking about this issue of patience and, particularly, why individuals in some societies are patient (those with high savings rates) and individuals in others are impatient (those with low savings rates). Laboratory tests conducted for purpose of establishing a relationship between sexual stimulus and consumption might have something to tell us on this issue.*

Researchers have found that exposure to sexual stimulus makes individuals impatient.

This makes me wonder if there is a relationship between patience and sex on the societal level, after all the saving rate in the U.S., and my country Canada, has been falling for the past 30 years; over a period in which we have had more and more exposure to sexual imagery. 

Imagine that you have a choice. You can choose between receiving a hundred dollars today and another dollar amount one year in the future. Now say that I ask you to specify the dollar amount in the future that will make you indifferent between the $100 today and that amount. The dollar amount that you chose tells me how patient you are to consume. So, say for example that you chose $100, so that you are indifferent between $100 today and $100 next year. That choice says that you are extremely patient and would be willing to save $100 at a very low interest rate; in fact, you would save at any interest rate above 0%. Alternatively, say that you would require $200 in a year’s time to make you indifferent between the two choices. That says you are extremely impatient to consume. In order to encourage you to save $100 now you would require an annual interest rate of 100%.

This is the type of test that was done in the research I mentioned above except that the (male) participants were asked this question after being exposed to different types of visual stimuli. The authors find that men who were exposed to images of non-naked women (in swimsuits and lingerie) posed in a provocative manner (i.e. the type of images we see every day in billboards and on store windows) were significantly more impatient to consume than those who were exposed to visually appealing, but non-erotic, landscapes.

The men who are visually sexually stimulated would save consistently saved less than the non-stimulated men.

The purpose of this research is to determine a relationship between sexually provocative marketing campaigns and consumption with the idea that sexually stimulated men engage in impulse buying. But perhaps there is an application for societies as a whole.

No one can deny that North Americans have become less patient, preferring consumption over savings. The results of this study suggest that the onslaught of sexual imagery we have seen in the past 20 years has conceivably played a role in that impatience.

If sex sells, then it seems to me that a case can be made for sex reducing the national savings rate.

*Van Den Bergh, Bram, Siegfried Dewitte, Luk Warlop (2008). “Bikinis Instigate Generalized Impatience in Intertemporal Choice.” Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 35.


Related

Up Next
  Novelist Jonathan Safran Foer wants you to stop eating meat—not because he cares so much about the fluffy animals, but because it's killing the environment. In his Big Think interview Foer shared with us just how devastating the factory farm industry is, something he learned while researching his first work of non-fiction, Eating Animals. "Animal agriculture is the number one cause of global warming, and yet very few people, including people who are normally quite political and quite moral and moralizing, talk about it.  And even fewer people act on their concerns about where food comes from." The reason changing Americans' eating habits is so difficult is because eating meat is ingrained in our cultural narratives as Americans. "Food is not just fact and it’s not just reason; it’s culture, it’s personal identity," Foer says. "It’s what our parents and our grandparents fed us, it's how we think of ourselves, and it’s always attached to some kind of a story.  And that confuses things.  The Thanksgiving turkey confuses things.  The Christmas ham confuses things.  Every family has its own version." And creating a new narrative that excludes meat will be tough largely because Americans are subsidized to eat this way. American farm subsidies lower the price of meat while encouraging inhumane and environmentally damaging farming practices, so much so that the real cost of a 50-cent hamburger, factoring in environmental costs, is actually $200. Plus, the subsidies hamstring farmers that use traditional, non-industrial methods of farming: "We have now created an economic system which is very advantageous to feed animals unnaturally, house them unnaturally, and raise genetic stocks that are destined for illness," Foer says.  "And the small farmers, who are really the heroes of my book, farmers at places like Niman Ranch, farmers like Frank Reese at Good Shepard, farmers like Paul Willis, are at a severe economic disadvantage for doing things the right way; for being environmentally responsible; for treating their animals like animals rather than like rocks or pieces of wood." Foer told us that change is very necessary but possible, debunking the idea that industrialized factory farming is necessary to feed the world. The idea that factory farming is necessary to feed the nearly 7 billion inhabitants of earth is "not only untrue, it’s the opposite of the truth," he says. "It takes seven calories of food input into an animal to produce one calorie of food output.  It’s an extraordinarily inefficient way to produce food." And if the Chinese and Indians begin to eat like American do, which has been the trend in the developing world, "we're going to have to farm twice as many animals as we do now." That would amount to 100 billion animals every year.  Foer also spoke to us about his fiction work, telling us that he values the freedom of fiction but that the same freedom is what makes fiction so difficult. And he gave us his take on the film adaptation of his debut novel "Everything Is Illuminated" as well as his thoughts about the form of the novel in the age of the iPad. Literature has always been "slower than the other art forms to grapple with technological and cultural changes...and I think that's one of the things that people love so much about it," he said. Whereas music and the visual arts have changed dramatically in the past 100 years, literature has remained largely the same. "Maybe it's been the saving grace of literature to be so conservative," Foer muses. "But maybe it will contribute to its death."